Abstract

Cephalosporins are among the most widely used antibiotics around the world to combat diseases of bacterial origin. The study and appreciation of antibiotics has become essential to ensure drug's quality, safety, and therapeutic efficacy. The objective of this research is to develop an simple, sensitive and cost-effective spectrophotometric method for the estimate four types of cephalosporin drugs,  containing a thiazole ring, such as; ceftriaxone ( CFX), cefotaxime (CFT), ceftazidime (CFZ), cefepime (CFP) in pharmaceutical formulations. The proposed method are based on coupling reactions between the above mentioned drugs and 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine reagent in alkaline mediums, to give stable colored complexes that can be measured accurately at the maximum wavelengths (λmax) 510, 505, 500 and 496nm, for CFX, CFT, CFZ and CFP respectivly. The optimum experimental conditions have been studied. The developed methods showed good linearity, Beer's law is obeyed in the concentrations range of 2 – 30, 4 – 33, 3 – 33 and 2.5 – 17 µg/mL for CFX, CFT, CFZ and CFP respectively with high correlation coefficients. Accuracy and precision were evaluated through recovery studies and repeatability tests, the molar absorptivity (ε), Sandell’s sensitivity (s), Limit of detection (LOD) and quantification limits (LOQ) for the studied drugs were calculated. Recovery studies shows that this method is accurate and can be successfully employed for the determination of the studied cephalosporin’s in quality control laboratories.